UK city taps thin clients and mainframes for greener computing

With alarms being raised about "Cyberwarming," a UK public/private consortium …

The BBC is reporting that concern over "Cyberwarming" is growing in the UK. Citing a figure that suggests that IT equipment pumps out 35 million metric tons of carbon a year, the Manchester City Council will be joining private ventures to form a Green Shift alliance to bring greater efficiency to the IT market. Their plans, however, read as if they aimed for environmental friendliness by recycling marketing materials issued by Sun and Oracle in the mid-90s.

Currently, there is no Green Shift web site, and no material on the Manchester City Council site. The only description available of the program comes in the form of a call for partners issued by the Council in advance of applying for European Union funding.

The proposal makes a twofold argument regarding current and future computing technology, and the place of energy efficiency within them. In terms of a typical user, the proposal's authors argue that a full-blown PC is overkill for their needs, which typically involve e-mail, light document editing, and web browsing. For those users, the PC is a waste of energy, and a small, dumb, but energy-efficient terminal (much like Oracle's network computer of yore) would readily fulfill their needs. This would shift the heavy lifting to a data center, where energy-efficient technology would be easier to implement and benefit from economies of scale.

On the other end of the computing spectrum, the proposal envisions small, embedded devices becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable of basic interactions with other devices through RFID signals and other wireless technology. For these devices, the expectation is that advances in communications power will not be accompanied by advances in processing power, leaving them incapable of much beyond announcing their presence and status. The integration and evaluation of this information would need to be relegated to a more sophisticated device, which the proposal envisions as residing in the same central data center.

There is a lot to be skeptical about in this proposal. Although it has become clear that many aspects of computing are energy inefficient, the industry's aggressive push into performance-per-watt marketing suggests that they've caught on to this concern. As more efficient PCs make their way onto the market, its doubtful that individual households would be able to see any major financial benefit from the energy savings gained by shifting to a dumb terminal. Since these economic incentives were expected to be the main motivator for the green shift, the whole foundation for the proposal seems improbable.

Meanwhile, it's not clear that these terminals would actually have the horsepower to run rich network applications. Current iterations of apps from companies like Google seem to require a reasonable amount of heavy lifting from the machine they're running on. Meanwhile, the security and privacy concerns associated with dumping all of a user's data on a central machine is staggering, and unlikely to appeal to a public that's constantly warned not to share personal information.

Overall, the PC market seems to have evolved to where it is based largely on meeting the desires of its customers, while competing efforts to provide simplified network machines have yet to gain any traction. With the rise of PDAs and smartphones plus the increase in laptop sales, it seems that an evolution towards energy-efficient devices is occurring without government intervention. Efforts such as Green Shift appear misguided, in that government money is likely to be more helpful if directed towards encouraging this evolution by setting and promoting efficiency standards.